He’s Reached A New Stage In Operatic Life

Here’s an opera for the 1990s: the hero is a teenage runaway sheltered by a chorus of heroin addicts who teach him to play string bass.

He runs from the group, survives by delivering peanuts and driving a hearse as a cab, falls in love with a preacher’s daughter who takes all his money, and is saved from life on a park bench by a symphony conductor whose friend’s flamboyant wife discovers the hero’s singing talent.

Too bizarre, even for opera? Maybe Tod Rainey should find another form in which to tell his life story.

He’s only 30, but he’s played bass in Chicago dives and sung at the Vienna Opera. He’s dressed as a clown to sell ice cream from a bicycle and he’s performed on Broadway.

“That was the least artistic thing I ever did in my life,” Tod says, blanching over his stint as Freddy in “My Fair Lady.” “I felt like I was flipping burgers.”

Now he’s teaching private voice lessons in Coeur d’Alene and working with the Coeur d’Alene Theater for Youth. He interrupted 16 years of chaos and career chasing last year to be near his two daughters, who live in Spokane with his ex-wife.

“Eventually I’m going back to singing,” he says in the resonant voice that’s landed him on opera stages around the world. “I just don’t know when.”

Tod ran from his Seattle home at 13 for reasons he keeps private. He hitched a ride in a Winnebago filled with worn-out musicians strung out on heroin.

“If you ever want to turn kids from drugs, just put them with a bunch of heroin addicts. It was pitiful,” he says.

Still, they fed him and introduced him to music when they needed a bass player. They stuck Tod in a room with a bass and a recording of a top-notch bass player and expected him to learn.

Tod picked up enough to bluff his way through roadside performances and a few club gigs. He ditched the group in Chicago two years later and caught a ride to North Carolina.

Odd jobs got Tod through a few years. He returned to Seattle at 18 and fell in love with the daughter of a freelance preacher. Within months, the relationship sucked his savings dry. He sought refuge on a bench in Pioneer Square.

That’s when his luck turned. A well-dressed man offered him lunch, adopted him, pulled some strings and enrolled him in Western Washington University, then sent him to New York to study with bass player Chuck Israel.

Israel’s wife, an opera singer, discovered Tod’s vocal talent.

“She got tired of me making fun of her warming up,” he says, grinning. “She told me if I wanted to stay with them, I had to learn one aria.”

He learned the bass part to an aria from “The Marriage of Figaro” and won $5,000 in an opera competition.

“It was more than I’d ever made at anything in my life,” he says. “I decided singing was a possibility.”

Training turned Tod into a baritone. His rich voice won him roles in Seattle and Chicago and as a soloist at a tribute in New York for composer Leonard Bernstein.

A scholarship to Indiana University followed, then marriage. But his career demanded all his attention.

Then, at 25, his voice changed. The opera world shunned him. One coach saw Tod’s potential as a dramatic tenor. He took him to Europe where Tod gave private recitals in Prague, Vienna, Berlin. Tod returned home to a role on Broadway then wrote two operas.

A Seattle company will perform his “Mama Don’t Hurt Me So Bad” next spring.

At 30, Tod is young for the best operatic roles. He’s willing to wait. The role in which he’s most interested now is fatherhood.

To be near his daughters, he’ll direct Coeur d’Alene’s children’s choir this summer and teach music at the Coeur d’Alene Theater for Youth’s workshops.

“I love working with kids. When I’m ready to start auditioning again, the roles will still be there.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: For information on the Coeur d’Alene Theater for Youth workshop call (208) 667-3530.